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[3] Atlas of Kharak – Tiir

Even though I just got a hold of some REALLY GOOD assets for the map of Kharak, for some reason I want to take a sidestep since i got a spontaneous vision and wanted to work on it some.

To get some background for this, a little while ago I ran across an interesting looking map:

It’s from Halo obviously, probably the city of reach. The link where I found this seems to say the original artist was Liam Keating, for the Starside Intercept mod for Homeworld 2. I like the style of it, simple polygons just to describe the shapes of the city with lined call-outs to say what they were. It reminded me of another map source I had when I was a kid:

This is from “The Picture Atlas of the World” from 1998. I had one as a kid since my mom worked for Discovery Toys for a while and got one for us. The city call outs really came to mind, and though I can’t seem to find my version of the book, this works just as well to remind me of how the maps worked.

Needless to say these ideas combined made me think I could probably try to model the capital city of Tiir, to at least present some kind of representation of the city. It would be a necessary addition to the atlas of the planet, no?

Research for Tiir itself isn’t hard, since there aren’t a lot of times Tiir itself is depicted. The first time we see Tiir (as an unnamed Kharak city, but most likely the planetary capital) is during the intro cinematic of Homeworld 1 showing the scaffolding under construction, and again when the city is destroyed by the Taiidan ADWs.

Tiir isn’t depicted in Cataclysm, but we have a re-draw of the city coming out of Homeworld: Remastered, which (I checked) was re-used for Deserts of Kharak with some lighting changes and the like. Here’s a good comparison of HW1 and HWR/DoK’s differences, slight as some might see them:

The greatest change is the massive dome in the background. I think its safe to call this the Daiamid’s council chambers, since it’s big and important. I keep wanting to call the foreground dome either the ministry of defense, or ministry of spaceflight, because this is Homeworld and spaceflight is just as important. The Dome has clearly gone through some changes, going from the tapered bowl-shape to a definate dome with hexagon plating.

It’s pretty clear that the buildings in between for the DoK map are brush constructions or stock photography overlayed into the shot. As I map Tiir I’m obsessively trying to recreate the individual buildings, but I might be making more work for myself than is necessary.

The embankment some of you might have noticed was implied in the wide-field sketch of Tiir just as it’s being blown up. From that image we’re given, I infer that Tiir has at least a large sand patch that it sits on the coast of. The risen embankment I feel is concrete. Perhaps taking a page out of Westwood’s Dune and San Francisco history, I feel that as Tiir expanded beyond the bedrock it was built on, concrete slabs were laid out to keep some buildings on a solid foundation and prevent sand-shift from destroying them.

There is very little known about Tiir from the lore, apart from that it is the Naabal capital and that it exists in a blasted valley near the pole. So whatever I make here is not going to be the strictest canon, but there’s a lot of wiggle room in the Homeworld universe.